


Part I: In the Lions' Den

by pensandbirds



Series: Their Fathers' Sons [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Albus Potter is an absolute sweetheart, Book: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, He is the absolute best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 14:31:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7644655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensandbirds/pseuds/pensandbirds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Albus Potter is more like his father than he might think - and slowly, he may come to find that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Part I: In the Lions' Den

Albus Severus Potter might have inherited his father’s looks, but he also inherited his mother’s angles, edges and sharp points.

(Like Harry himself, he looked like his father on the outside, but had his mother’s nature).

In between James’s good-natured, full-bellied laughs and Lily’s fairy-like movements and flowing hair, Albus felt like a thistle, sharp and overlooked, until it was an irritating burr on your sock. He had messy dark hair and almond-shaped green eyes and that is where he thought the similarities with his father stopped.

He did not realize that he was, in so many ways, the other path his father could have taken.

***

Stone walls are, invariably, stone. It is their nature to be hard, cold, unmoving. From the outside, they are formidable, a fortress. It is the inside that makes them warm, soft, home.

Hogwarts was a castle of stone. Albus saw the stone for what it was, not what it could be. His father had seen the warm firelight reflected and the strength that kept the cold out and the magic that whispered in those ancient walls. Harry saw home. Albus saw a prison, whispering and reminding him of who he should have been, who he was expected to be. 

(One day, Albus would hear dementors. One of the things they would drown him in would be his father’s words: “Sometimes I wish you weren’t my son." 

His Patronus would come through his father’s words as well: "Is he all right? Just tell me he’s all right!” And it would come through the remembrance of his mother’s embrace, her warmth and scent of flowers and broomstick polish and knitted wool. It would come through his best friend by his side, the thought of his siblings and cousins, seeing himself a part of them. Harry found home amongst stone, but Albus found home in words and wool and laughter, not symbolized by stone.)

Albus’s ambition did not come from a want for power or influence or personal gain. The Sorting Hat saw his wringing heart, yearning to be more than just his name, his unfortunately given name, and the Hat called it ambition. Three words, eighteen letters, that he desperately wanted to break free from. They reflected back on Albus from those hard stone walls, and he longed to break them to rubble. 

The Hat called “Slytherin.” The Great Hall stared at the boy with Harry Potter’s hair and eyes, things they thought were surely only compatible with scarlet and gold. Albus was suddenly aware of his edges and angles, sharp and obvious. The whispers were immediate, his name twisting back in ways that cut like shards.

(How did they forget those eyes staring back at them were green? Color shouldn’t matter, but maybe it should have been an indicator.)

***

Albus had forgotten, by the time he eavesdropped on the stairs, that etched on his father’s hand were the old scars from the words “I must not tell lies.” All he would remember, from being a young child curled on his father’s lap, was a certain feeling that his father didn’t lie.

(He would not know the story behind those scars, because his father and mother and aunts and uncles would not speak of that time. There are some enemies that need no explanation, no warning; they appear in everyone’s lives. Unnatural evil becomes mythological, but twisted, normal evil is so in the fabric of life, there is a tendency to forget that a new generation is unfamiliar with it.)

Hearing his father lie would enrage Albus (confuse him if he was honest), turn the world he thought he knew on its head. His father looked an old man who was in pain in the eye and said he couldn’t help him. 

(A young woman saw the pain crack in the face of a fourteen year old boy, the rage he wore on his green sleeves, and a smile twisted across her own face, the mask hiding her own conflict.) 

Later, when Harry brought in a love potion and an old blanket (when his sister had fairy wings and his brother a cloak that had been passed down from father to precious son for ages, the thread woven through lives for generations), Albus’s anger and pain compounded. The feeling that all his father thought of him was an old blanket, maybe acknowledged once a year, was as harsh as stone.

(He didn’t see how Harry was saying that he was beyond precious, a gift unexpected, something he was still trying to come to terms with. A reminder of where it all started. These were the words Ginny encouraged him to say, words Harry didn’t know how to form. Harry once spoke the language of snakes, but he didn’t know the language of the one that sat next to him.) 

Albus’s ambition was to do right, to set the world right, to be his own man. His cunning was his weakness, to talk himself into feeling that he wasn’t already there. Hogwarts was a reminder of all he wasn’t. 

(Once, Hogwarts was a reminder of all Harry wasn’t: normal, familiar with a world he longed to be a part of, a person with a home to go back to.)

***

Godric’s Hollow was where Harry’s story began. 

It is where Albus’s story began too. Well, not exactly. But it is where Albus saw what made him, the expectations he was supposed to live up to, and he saw that he would never get away from the beginning of this story. 

It was also where he saw a woman with red hair (like his sister, like his mother) and his same eyes pause, and look at him as if she should know him. Standing in a forgotten patch of weeds quickly being covered in quieting white, Albus looked at her, time frozen as the October air. It was where his realized messy dark hair and green eyes and a particular stance and that determination and desire for right that marked him as a Potter. Not Slytherin. Not Gryffindor. Not edges or angles or thistles. Not the disappointment. Not three words, eighteen letters. Not the new Harry. Just family. Just one of hers. 

(Another way Albus was like Harry: had he found himself in front of a mirror that showed heart’s desire, he too would have seen himself surrounded by family with his same eyes and hair and smile and ears and knobbly knees. Albus too would have seen himself embraced by family, all grinning at him.)

Godric’s Hollow was where Albus stood by his father’s side. It was where Albus knew he fit into the narrative before him, but he could write his own after. This was his story. He leaned into his father, holding him up as he watched his father’s story begin, where his story began, and he finally felt he belonged there.

**Author's Note:**

> I was lucky enough to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on stage in London, and it was one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen. In the month since then, Albus and Scorpius haven't left me alone, nor have the striking parallels they each had with their fathers. It's a new generation of wizard kids, and I feel lucky to have experienced their story.


End file.
